From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

The plan was promptly carried out, and after seeing the Only Muse safely on her way to other quarters I went to number thirty-two, gathered up our traps, and with trepidation in my soul approached the landlord. This time I found him sitting in the office, before the window, staring Nature out of countenance.

"Well, Mr. Landlord," I said, as affably as I knew how, "I – I've come to – to settle up. It seems we were expected to stay with Dr. and Mrs. Soandso. We – er – we didn't know it when we arrived – and I – I'm sorry to leave you; but – er – but of course – "

"Thank God!" the landlord returned explosively, rising and seizing my hand in a viselike grip that even to remember two years later causes me anguish. "That's the first good news I've had to-day. I been running this blankety blank blank joint for seven years now, and it's cost me over thirty thousand dollars already, and every time I see a blinkety blank blank boarder come in through that front door it makes me so dashed sick that I feel like nailin' the blankety blank door up so tight old Beelzybub himself'd have to come down through the chimbley to get inside!"

It was at this point that Conk and I parted company at the beginning of what I am inclined to think might have ripened into a lifelong friendship. I had got his point of view! Strange as his conception of hospitality seemed superficially to be, there was reason in him, and I began to perceive that he had some mighty good points. Frankness was one of them, and gratitude, and one of the incidents of his career as narrated to me later by one of his neighbors was convincing proof that, in sporting parlance, the old fellow was a good loser.

It seems that a certain traveling man of great nerve force stopped overnight some years ago with Conk, probably occupying number thirty-two. It was a fearfully hot night, and the room became unbearably stuffy. For a long time the suffering guest strove to open the window, but without results. Prayer, condemnation, muscular force, all alike were powerless to move it. Finally in desperation the unhappy visitor threw on his dressing robe, and stalked down to the office to make complaint.

"It's hotter than Tophet in that room of mine," he protested, "and I've been monkeying with that dod-gasted window of yours for the last hour, and the dinged thing won't give an inch!"

"Well, if ya can't move it, why in Dothan dontcha kick it out?" retorted Conk coldly.

"All right, I will," said the guest, returning to the furnace above.

And he did. Glass, frame, and sash were kicked with all the power of an angry man into a mass of wreckage never again to be redeemed.

"Well," said the guest the following morning, as he started to leave for the station, "what's the tax? What do I owe you?"

"Not a blamed cent!" gruffed Conk. "You're the first son of a sea cook that's ever had the nerve to call my bluff, and by Henry you don't pay a nickel into my till except over my dead body!"

If I have seemed in any wise severe in my treatment of Conk in this tribute to his memory, I am sorry. The material facts could hardly be glossed over; but as for the man himself I am truly glad to have met him. I wouldn't have missed him for a farm. He was not much of a Chesterfield; but he had his own ways, and they gave me a thrill. The joyous, almost grateful courtesy with which he put me out of his front door was a thing to remember, and I in turn am everlastingly grateful to him for letting me out on the ground floor instead of seizing me by the left leg and dragging me up through the skylight, and throwing me off the roof. He could have done it easily, and I am sure it was only the intrinsic, if considerably latent, nobility of his soul that restrained the impulse to do so that I am confident he felt.

XII

PERILS OF THE PLATFORM

"Yours must be an extra hazardous occupation," said a chance acquaintance on a little trip through Ohio last year. "Do you carry any insurance?"

"Yes," said I. "I have an excellent accident insurance policy, and it is a great comfort. Sometimes on dark nights when I am suddenly awakened by some catastrophic quivering of my berth, as if a young earthquake had come aboard, and realize that the train has probably left the track, and is traveling ahead at a mile-a-minute clip over the rocky bed of some mountain stream, it is a real pleasure to me to foot up the sum total of the affluence that will be mine if we fail to strike a switch somewhere that will get us back on the main line again."

"Affluence is good," said he; "but it won't be yours – not if you break your neck."

"Oh, I never think of that," said I. "I think only of the possibility of injuries, and from that point of view the accident insurance policy is a joy forever. It makes you think so well of yourself, and as you lie off in your berth figuring on two legs and a couple of arms at five thousand dollars apiece, twenty toes and fingers at two hundred and fifty a digit, with your neck valued at twenty-five thousand dollars, you begin to feel that a man isn't such a worthless creature after all. I suppose even my nose is worth something."

"Great Scott!" he ejaculated. "Do toes and fingers come as high as that?"

"They do," said I. "I've carried a policy assuring me a market for them at that rate for the last five years, and if I lose them in a railway smash-up, in a taxicab, in a trolley, or in a public elevator somewhere, the quotation doubles. Under certain contingencies my fingers and toes have a market value of ten thousand dollars."

"Heavens!" he cried. "Have you ever had any luck?"

From his point of view I presume I have not had any "luck"; but I am content, satisfied, and even grateful that so far the exigencies of travel have not required me to collect anything on my policy, or compelled me to sacrifice any of my digital collateral even at what seem to be par or premium prices.

But my friend was not altogether wrong in regarding the occupation of an itinerant lyceumite as a hazardous one. If one were to conjure up a picture of the gods of evil shooting darts at human targets, one might think that, a moving object being harder to hit than one that is definitely fixed, the former would prove a better risk than the latter; but it is one of the paradoxes of life that this is not the case, unless of course the sniping fates are better sharpshooters than professional artillerists.

The possibilities of accident to one who is constantly moving from pillar to post on American railways, many of them starved to death in the name of Progress, and unable to maintain an equipment that is even moderately safe; on steamboat lines many of whose vessels are little more than resin-soaked tinderboxes, over-crowded with pipe and cigarette smokers, and speeding through fog-bound waters at night as though the Evil One himself were just astern in pursuit of the Captain; sleeping in hotels constructed of Georgia pine, on mattresses stuffed with excelsior, with matches that, like flies, will light on anything in sight, strewn about on every side, – well, to commute this sentence, the possibilities of accident to such a one are of such a sort that "age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite variety."

And as for the lecture halls, one now and then encounters a place where it seems as though it were a vain-glorious tempting of fate to enter it. I recall one marvelous hall in one of the most cultured sections of New England, in a town not more than seventy-five miles from Boston, the home of one of America's most famous schools, and the capital of a State that has produced men of worldwide eminence, which in any Court of Commonsense would have been indicted as a menace to the public welfare. It was reached by a climb of two flights of stairs, the first scarcely wide enough for two people to walk up abreast, and the second rising from the end of a dimly lighted corridor up six steps to a landing whence ran on each side two other sections of four or five steps each to a second landing, with still a third turn and another climb before the auditorium floor was reached; and all this in an ordinary brick building, erected long before fireproof construction was even thought of.

My lecture in this architectural device of Beelzebub was delivered before an audience of four hundred people, just one week after the terrible disaster at Boyerstown, Pennsylvania, in which I know not how many lives were lost in a fire started by the explosion of a cinematograph machine. As I stepped upon the stage I inquired of my escort if there were any fire escapes on the building, and was informed that a huge iron door at the rear of the stage opened upon one. I was moderately relieved until I tried to open the iron door, only to find it locked —and the janitor had left the key at home! I may add that if my memory serves me correctly – and it does – this ingeniously designed atrocity was pleasantly and appropriately known as Phenix Hall. Absit omen!

In the main, however, the lecture halls of America are rather fine affairs. In the State of New York and on the other side of the Mississippi River I have found splendid auditoriums, acoustically perfect, well ventilated, and as nearly safe as human ingenuity can make them. The high schools of New York and Massachusetts, and the flourishing educational institutions of the West, have set a pace which other communities would do well to follow: not so much for the sake of the itinerant platformist as for the "safety, honor, and welfare" of their own sons and daughters. In Houston, Texas, where there is a municipally owned free lecture and music course on Sunday afternoons, beginning in October and running through to May, is one of the finest auditoriums I have ever seen anywhere. It seats in comfort and safety an audience of eight thousand, and neither New York, Boston, Philadelphia, nor even Chicago, has anything comparable to it.

I have indeed had luck according to my own conception of it, on trains traveled on, and in respect to trains missed as well. I have been in two railway smash-ups, in the first of which the car behind mine was overturned and reduced to kindling in the twinkling of an eye, and miraculously without serious injury to any one; and in the other the engine directly in front of the car in which I was sitting, having endeavored to jump a frozen switch, succeeded only in landing upon its own back, leaving my car teetering to and fro for a moment as if undecided whether to roll down an embankment, or to remain poised on its offside wheels like a ballet girl balanced upon one tangoing toe. If the gentleman who sat beside me on that occasion had shifted his chewing gum to the other side, I think we should have gone plunging down that embankment into the river; but fortunately he was too paralyzed with fear even to do that, and we remained fixed, safe as ever was the intrepid Blondin when he essayed to walk across Niagara Falls on his slack wire.

As for the trains missed, it was only an over-prolonged discussion of the mysteries of golf between myself and a past-master of putting at Haverhill, Massachusetts, which caused me to miss by ten seconds a section of the Portland Express to New York that five hours later landed in a ditch somewhere in Connecticut.

In respect to perils by water there are the steamboat perils, and those more insidious dangers that come from too free indulgence in the only kind of beverage the wise platformist dares adopt as a steady tipple. These latter perils I have tried to reduce to a minimum by having a billion and a half typhus germs mobilized within to patrol my system, so that any skulking bacilli seeking to spread revolutionary ideas in my midst, and gaining admittance thereto through my taste for ice water, will be seized and duly throttled ere they have time to lay the foundation for an effective propaganda.

But there is no inoculation against the perils of steamboats; although I have been in imminent danger only once in this way, and in its ultimate results even that was far more amusing than terrifying. I was on my way to Boston by the Fall River boat when the incident occurred. The night was foggy, and I retired early. The faithful craft kept steadily on her way, feeling her path through the dark waters of the sound. I slept only fitfully until midnight, when weary Nature at last asserted herself, and I fell into a profound slumber. At four in the morning, however, I was awakened rudely by a fierce shriek of the whistle, a seemingly quick reversal of the engines, a very decided shock as of an impact with some heavy body, followed by a grinding sound, and much shouting.

I sprang from my berth, and glancing out of the window could see nothing but grimly gray fog. It was the work of a moment to jump into my shoes and bathrobe, and go speeding out into the main saloon.

"Any danger, Porter?" I inquired of a wide-awake gentleman of color, who was leaning over the stair-railing.

"Not unless yo' goes asho', Kuhnnel," he replied with a grin. "Dis is Newport."

But there are perils other than these which must be taken into account in reckoning up the hazards of the profession – or perhaps in view of the eternity of the chase it were better called a pursuit. They include exposure to almost every kind of catastrophe mentioned in the Litany, from battle, murder, and sudden death, through hunger and thirst, to the tapering point of mere necessity and tribulation.

I have nearly starved with teeming granaries on every side of me. Once in a delightful mid-New York community which I have since revisited and come to hold in affection, I found myself after a long, tedious, and foodless journey at a hotel where the table was frankly impossible. I arrived late, and out of an ample bill of fare there was nothing left but a few scraps of preserved fish, and not very well preserved at that. If fish could be personified, this particular bit of piscatorial cussedness might have passed as the Rip Van Winkle of the Sea, so long had it evidently been since it left its home in the depths. The merest glance at it filled the eye with visions of serried ranks of ptomaines, armed cap-à-pie for trouble. It waved the red flag of digestive anarchy from the end of every bone and fin, and fortunately for me the very pungency of its aroma took care of my hunger for the moment. One sniff appeased my appetite for any kind of food.

Later, when the chairman of the committee called and invited me to take a drive with him about the town, even though I had had nothing to eat for nearly twelve hours, I accepted. At the end of our drive we stopped at the chairman's home, a delightfully comfortable, newly built house, which he had designed himself and of which he was justly proud. As we entered his dining room a natural association of ideas caused my appetite to return with renewed vigor, and I thought I saw a chance for at least one good meal that day.

"By Jove, Doctor!" said I, "what a pretty room this is!" And then I added, with all the pathos I could put into my voice, "You don't know what a joy it is to get a glimpse now and then of a real home dining room after eating day after day in some of these fearful country hotels. I don't want to seem unduly critical, but really I got the worst dinner at the Blithers House to-day that I've ever had." And I stood expectant.

"Well," he said reflectively, "you'll get a worse supper!"

And lo, it was so.

A similarly distressing moment one morning out in Montana once brought me a more satisfactory tribute. My train was hours late, and no preparations had been made by the usually considerate management of the Northern Pacific Railroad for the refreshment of the inner man. There was neither diner nor buffet on the train, and as the morning wore on toward noon I became famished to the extent of positive pain and general giddiness. To my supreme relief, however, along about half-past eleven o'clock the train drew into the little station of Livingston, where connections are made by travelers to the Yellowstone. As we drew slowly in the welcome sign of "LUNCH ROOM" greeted my vision; but the train did not stop until we had passed the sign by at least a hundred yards. Finally when we came to a standstill I rushed to the rear platform of the train, and was about to jump off when the conductor intervened.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"For food," said I. "I'm nearly dead for a cup of coffee."

"We're not going to stop any time," said he, with a glance at his watch. "We're seven hours late as it is."

"Oh, come now, Conductor!" said I. "Five minutes more isn't going to hurt anybody – "

"All right," said he, "go ahead. Only when you hear the whistle blow don't lose a minute, hungry or no hungry."

With that understanding I sped to the lunch counter, and in a few moments had a roll and a steaming cup of coffee before me; but, alas for all human expectations! the coffee was so fearfully hot nothing but a salamander could have hoped to drink it with safety, and I had hardly taken one scalding sip of it when the whistle blew sharply. There was but one thing to do, and I did it. I poured the coffee into my saucer and drained as much as I could of it from that, thrust the roll into my pocket, and darted after the train, which had already begun to move slowly, conscious all the while of the soft thud of pattering feet, like those of the white rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland," behind me. I caught the train, seizing the rear platform rail with one hand, and when swinging myself on board was projected almost flat on my face by another passenger who suddenly developed like an infant battering ram at the rear. He was a little man, and his breath came in appropriate pants. Both completely winded, we gazed into each other's eyes.

"Bub-beg pardon," he gasped. "I dud-didn't mean to bub-bump into you. Very grateful to you – yuh – you saved my life!"

"Saved your life?" said I. "How so?"

"Why," said he, "I was nearly gone for want of my coffee, and the stuff was so infernally hot I couldn't drink it, and then when I saw you pouring yours out into your saucer, I says to myself, 'Well, if a swell-lookin' guy like that kin do that, I kin, – an' b'gosh, I did!"